"A Testament" - Poem by Borys Humenyuk, MIA

Today we are digging the earth again

This hateful Donetsk earth

This stale, petrified earth

We press ourselves into it

We hide in it

Still alive

We hide behind it

Sit silently in it

Like little children behind their mother’s back

We hear its heart beating

Its weary breath

We are warm and comfortable

Still alive

Tomorrow we will die

Maybe some of us

Maybe all of us

Don’t take us from the earth

Don’t tear us away from our mother

Don’t gather our remains from the field

Don’t try to put us back together again

And — we beg you — don’t erect crosses

Monuments or memorial slabs

We don’t need them

Because it isn’t for us —

You erect these monuments for yourselves.

Don’t engrave our names,

Simply remember:

On this field

In this earth

Ukrainian soldiers lie

And — that is all.

We don’t need funerals

We know where our place is

Simply cover us with earth

And move on

It would be nice if there was a field

Where rye is swaying

A lark flies overhead

And — the sky

The endless sky —

Can you imagine the grain a field

Where warriors are lying will yield?

To remember us, eat the grain from the field

Where we laid down our lives

It would be good if there were meadows there

And many flowers

And a bee under each flower

And lovers who come in the evening

To weave wreaths

To make love till dawn

And during the day, let new parents

Bring their young children

Don’t keep children from coming to us

But this will be tomorrow

Today we are still digging the earth

This cherished Ukrainian earth

This sweet, gentle earth

And with a soldier’s spade we write as one

On its body

The last Ukrainian poem of the last poets

Left alive

- Boris Humenyuk, currently MIA

Click to text excerpt below to link to Luke Harding's full Dec 2023 story in The Guardian:

"A year ago, the poet Borys Humenyuk sent a final message. For 24 hours, he and two fellow Ukrainian soldiers had been under relentless Russian fire. Shells rained down on their trench outside the eastern city of Bakhmut. “We’re running out of ammo. Down to the last bullet,” Humenyuk said over a crackling radio. Those were his last words.

Humenyuk had volunteered to relieve a group of exhausted service personnel at “zero”, the hottest part of the frontline. Now, he explained, he was wounded in the shoulder and unable to drag his injured comrade to safety. “We are stuck,” he reported. By the time an evacuation team reached the trench in the village of Klishchiivka, Humenyuk had disappeared ...." 

-Luke Harding, the Gaurdian